NauenThen

Just finished Judy Blunt's ferocious memoir, Breaking Clean, about growing up on a ranch in eastern Montana. Although she was born in 1954, you might well have thought it was 50 or a hundred years earlier. There was a grim Victorian assumption that the individual was sacrificed to the family and that women couldn't inherit or run things. No wonder she fled—even though she was 3rd or 4th generation there & loved the land. It sounds idyllic, doesn't it, riding horses, cutting cattle—but when you know none of it can really ever belong to you, you too would flee, I think.